Carl Grant, a Vietnam veteran with dementia, wandered out of a hospital room to charge a cellphone he imagined he had. When he wouldn’t sit still, the police officer escorting Grant body-slammed him, ricocheting the patient’s head off the floor.
Taylor Ware, a former Marine and aspiring college student, walked the grassy grounds of an interstate rest stop trying to shake the voices in his head. After Ware ran from an officer, he was attacked by a police dog, jolted by a stun gun, pinned on the ground and injected with a sedative.
And Donald Ivy Jr., a former three-sport athlete, left an ATM alone one night when officers sized him up as suspicious and tried to detain him. Ivy took off, and police tackled and shocked him with a stun gun, belted him with batons and held him facedown.
Each man was unarmed. Each was not a threat to public safety. […]
We have to start admitting to ourselves several difficult truths: 1) We are a very violent society. We glorify violence on multiple levels. It is a high valence societal value; 2) Going along with this it should surprise no one that this is an impedius for our running a worldwide empire where we have bombed or invaded over 20 countries over the past 50 years;3) We are one of the largest (if not the largest) supplier of arms around the world; 5) Because of the increasing culture of distrust, which was put on steroids, with the passage of the so called “patriot act”, our citizens no longer trust governmental institutions, which no longer value the constitution; 6) Because of distrust he have a high firearms ownership rate. I could go on and on but you get the idea. To change this trajectory we must change the culture. This process has already begun; however, it is far from clear what will replace the culture. The change may end up being bloody indeed.